Love, leave me like the light,
The gently passing day;
We would not know, but for the night,
When it has slipped away.
Go quietly; a dream,
When done, should leave no trace
That it has lived, except a gleam
Across the dreamer's face.
This poem is in the public domain.
A man who is probably my husband sails by.
But I just see a sailboat, not who steers it.
But I picture a man, in the gender of things.
My husband who you will not meet.
He’s off, I don’t know, marshalling.
Ideas, not soldiers. Sailing helps him think.
I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly
decorative, a mermaid on the prow.
Whether I brought him better luck
is not my weather to tell. I cost him.
Time. He costs me. More.
Copyright © 2022 by Jameson Fitzpatrick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
*To gradually steal all the possessions out of a neighbour’s house by borrowing & not returning —Anjana Iyer
Your mother slaps a frenzy of honey on her plain soft bread
asking where the toaster’s gone & where’s her thieving daughter-in-law?
I stole her favorite cowboy boots & bought a ticket
for the rodeo. I watched the sun setting behind the bleachers
& held a cup of cold beer to my lips, unthinking of you.
Yes, I took your toaster & a set of tongs your hard-of-hearing
mother thought you said were her thongs & I laughed
at the impracticality before I took her wedding linen & monogrammed
bedding off the bed she’ll die in. When you lived in my house you ate
cake every day. You left cigarette burns in my cushions.
The yellowed newspaper clipping announcing our engagement, its picture of us
down by the river where we used to fool around?—I stole that too.
The bullhorns from their pens signaled disaster to anyone who knew the
signs. I stole the dirt shadowing the air. I stole the whole show.
From Landscape with Headless Mama (Pleiades Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Givhan. Used with the permission of the author.
I
On ashes of old volcanoes
I lie baking
the deathward flesh in the sun.
I can hear
a door, far away,
banging in the wind:
Mole Street. Quai-aux-Fleurs. Françoise.
Greta. “After Lunch” by Po Chu-I.
“The Sunflower” by Blake.
2
And yet I can rejoice
that everything changes, that
we go from life
into life,
and enter ourselves
quaking
like the tadpole, its time come, tumbling toward the slime.
From Collected Poems by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.